Obvious Independence of Clones

Abstract: The Independence of Clones (IoC) criterion measures a voting rule's robustness to strategic nomination. Prior literature has established empirically that individuals may still submit costly, distortionary misreports even in strategy-proof (SP) settings, due to failure to recognize the SP property. The intersection of these issues motivates the search for mechanisms that are Obviously Independent of Clones (OIoC): where strategic nomination/exiting of clones obviously has no effect on the outcome. We construct a formal and intuitive definition of a voting rule being OIoC and examine five IoC rules to identify whether they satisfy OIoC.